Random Stuff

Wednesday, July 12, 2017

In the previous post I cited automation potential as one of the reasons to change registrars. While it’s a pretty strong reason for cloud admins, it might be a bit obscure for others…

Back in the day Google offered free edition of G Suite (Google Apps for Domain). As I acquired domains and corresponding free G Suite licenses, each required creation of various DNS records for integration. These days G Suite is not free, but plenty of organisations use it and must go through the same process. IaC is a passion of mine, so I decided to hone my Terraform skills and write a module for creation and management of G Suite DNS records. For now this module relies on Cloudflare and their free DNS hosting, in the future I might add support for other DNS hosting services like Route 53.

Monday, April 3, 2017

In the previous post I used Packer to remove block device mappings from Ubuntu AMI to ensure EC2 auto-recovery is working. While Packer is a fantastic tool with many features, it is synchronous in its nature and requires active SSH connection to the temporary instance in order to bake new AMI.

Can we get similar results with AWS tools alone? Indeed, we can!

In December of 2016, at the re:Invent, AWS announced a slew of interesting new features for their Amazon EC2 Systems Manager (a.k.a. SSM). The initial documentation and tutorials were sparse, so their capabilities weren't immediately clear. One of these new features, Automation, offers functionality similar to Packer, so I decided to learn more about it by applying to my simple use case.

Thursday, February 19, 2015

Since release of Android 4.2 the "Developer options" menu is not visible in the Settings by default. Regular users won't miss it, but for those of us who like to tinker with ADB and need the "USB debugging" option enabled, here's how to get it back:

Go to the "Settings" menu.

Scroll to the bottom and tap "About phone" menu.

Scroll to the bottom and tap on "Build number" seven (7) times.

After this your "Developer options" should be back in the "Settings" menu and you be able to start voiding your warrantee like a hacker. "You are now a developer!"